Windows Servers Beat Linux Servers

RobbeR49 writes "Windows Server 2003 was recently compared against Linux and Unix variants in a survey by the Yankee Group, with Windows having a higher annual uptime than Linux. Unix was the big winner, however, beating both Windows and Linux in annual uptime. From the article: 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.' Yankee Group is claiming no bias in the survey as they were not sponsored by any particular OS vendor."

Comments

Yup, agreed.

[Bazman]

Our Windows 2003 TS servers have a much longer uptime than our Linux servers that are accessed from our lab. Simply because fewer people choose to use the Windows service....

Re:my Math more reliable than Yankee survey

[DragonWriter]

Implied in the article then, a Windows 2003 server would have to be "up" approximately 20% more to satisfy the "claim". Now, I am not a calendar "expert", but I'm having a difficult time believing that Windows 2003 server is up an average of 364 * 1.2, or 436.8 days a year. If it is, I'm buying.

Maybe they are measuring "subjective uptime": it only seems like 436.8 days a year when you are supporting a Windows server?

Re:Math Nitpick

[Coryoth]

More to the point -- is "uptime" the opposite of "downtime" or is it "uptime" as in the output of the "uptime" command? With the latter, the 20% difference is at least plausible;

Ah, now we get to the heart of the matter. Obviously Microsoft has managed to pull ahead by padding the output of the uptime command: 20% more characters means 20% more uptime!

Re:Math Nitpick

[Ucklak]

So basically you're saying it's crappy Microsoft programming again.

If you have a Win2K3 server and a Linux server side by side and they've been running for 120 hours as measured by an independent timepiece,
Linux uptime would report

14:28:27 up 5 days, 0:0, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.17, 0.66

Windows uptime would report

Current System Uptime: 6 day(s), 0 hour(s), 0 minute(s), 0 second(s)